ABSTRACT
The historian must feel some reluctance in discrediting the romantic story of the attachment of Cleopatra and Antony at this period; but nevertheless the fact cannot be denied that they had now decided to live apart from one another, and there seems very little doubt that each regarded the other with distrust and suspicion. Antony had lived so long alone in his Timonium that he was altogether out of touch with his wife’s projects; and she, on her part, had not, for many a month, admitted him fully into her confidence. Their relationship was marked, on his side, by mistrust, and on hers, by disdainful pity; and I can find no indication of that romantic passage, hand-in-hand to their doom, which has come to be regarded as the grand finale of their tragic tale. In its place, however, I would offer the spectacle of the lonely and courageous fight made by the little Queen against her fate, which must surely command the admiration of all men. Her husband having so signally failed her, the whole burden of the government of her country and of the organisation of her defence seems to have fallen upon her shoulders. Day and night she must have been harassed by fearful anxieties, and haunted by the thought of her probable doom; yet she conducted herself with undaunted courage, never deigning to consider the question of flight, and never once turning from the pathway of that personal and dynastic ambition which seems to me hardly able to be distinguished from her real duty to her country.
